Collaborations Workshop 2018 (CW18) - #CollabW18

Twitter: #CollabW18

The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshops series brings together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. Collaboration Workshop 18 (CW18) took place from Monday 26th to Wednesday 28th March 2018 at The School of Mathematics, Cardiff University.

The themes of the workshop were Culture Change, Productivity and Sustainability.

Agenda

Accommodation

Why Culture Change

As much as some individuals want to deny or discredit open access and open science, each year we see more researchers adopting open practices, such as submitting pre-prints to arXiv, bioRxiv, SocArxiv and similar repositories. However, some changes happen at a slow pace; for example, the use of closed source research software that compromises research reproducibility. Discussions will centre around the following questions: how and what can we do to speed up some cultural changes to drive the research community to archive reproducibility sooner?

Why Productivity

Some claim that evaluating research productivity is easy since we only need to count the numbers of papers published in a given space of time. Unfortunately, with the advance of open access and open science practices, measuring research productivity has got more difficult. Even solutions such as Altmetric don't solve this problem for the community because they exclude some sources—Altmetric doesn't use GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or another source code repository for their analisys. The workshop discussions will revolve around: in addition to how can we evaluate scientific productivity, what tools and workflows can we use to improve our productivity as researchers? For example, does test-driven development improve the productivity of research software engineers?

More about Collaborations Workshop 2018

The Software Sustainability Institute invites all members of the research software community to explore and discuss the questions above and other questions at CW18.

CW18 attendees will gain insight into the topics of Culture Change, Productivity and Sustainability and how these impact and will impact on research. It is also an ideal opportunity to form collaborations (on average, attendees of CW’s start two new collaborations by attending) and to discuss topics proposed by attendees. CW18 is a great place to network and participants will meet many of the new and existing Software Sustainability Institute's Fellows—key ambassadors in varied research domains.

Some aspects of Culture Change, Productivity, and Sustainability planned to be covered in the workshop are: